Maike: Designing a Socratic Educational Chatbot to Foster Critical Thinking and Learner Agency

Generative AI tools are increasingly used by students for writing support, yet many existing systems risk promoting cognitive offloading, dependency, and homogenized thinking by providing direct answers or polished content. In this paper, we present Maike, a student-centric educational chatbot designed to foster critical thinking through Socratic dialogue rather than content generation. Maike combines four modules: (1) argument mining, (2) pedagogical strategy selection, (3) critical question generation, and (4) Socratic dialogue. Instead of polished, pre-packaged text, Maike poses targeted, thought-provoking questions to encourage students to articulate assumptions and evidence, and refine arguments. We describe Maike’s architecture and design principles across four dimensions for responsible educational AI: cognition, agency, emotion, and ethics. Our approach emphasizes desirable difficulties, learner autonomy, and privacy-preserving deployment via small open-source language models running locally. In future work, we plan to evaluate Maike in classroom studies to assess learning outcomes and its impact on the students’ independent writing and critical thinking skills. This work describes a concrete example of how generative AI can be designed as a cognitive scaffold rather than a cognitive substitute, offering practical guidance for human-centered AI tools in education.